Guest lecture: Dr. Mikhail Trunin, “Jaan Kaplinski’s Estonian-Russian Poetic Bilingualism and its Contextualization in post-Soviet Estonia”

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

4:00 – 5:45 pm

Kaplan 311

Synopsis

Jaan Kaplinski (1941–2021) was one of Estonia’s most renowned poets and public intellectuals, a Nobel Prize in Literature nominee whose works have profoundly impacted Estonian and European cultures. In the later years of his life, he took the unusual step of writing poetry in Russian, reflecting his language curiosity and engagement with the cross-cultural conversation between very different and, at times, mutually hostile ethnic and linguistic groups. The lecture examines Kaplinski’s unique yet incomplete endeavor and situates it within the broader phenomenon of literary bilingualism on the one hand and contemporary cultural dynamics in Eastern Europe on the other.

About the Speaker

Mikhail Trunin is Researcher at Tallinn University, Estonia. He is a recipient of the 2024 Jaan Kaplinski Stipendium, the 2023 Looming magazine literary reviewer award winner, and a nominee for the Ants Oras literary criticism award in 2022. His academic interests include comparative literature, cultural semiotics, and the history of humanities. Dr. Trunin’s research focuses on the intellectual and artistic legacies of Estonian- and Russian-language authors and scholars who lived and worked in the northernmost Baltic country, such as Jaan Kross, Jaan Kaplinski, and Juri Lotman.

Selected publications by Mikhail Trunin:

♦ “Lotman and Russian Formalism,” in The Companion to Juri Lotman. London: Bloomsbury, 2022, 47−61.
♦ “Semiosphere and History,” Sign Systems Studies 45.3/4 (2017): 335−360.
♦ “Jaan Kross’s ‘On Mayakovsky and Those Others’ as a Mirror of Soviet Urbanism: The Estonian Poetic Text in the Russian Political Context,” in Urban Semiotics. Tallinn: TLU Press, 2015, 88−118.
♦ “Perepiska Ju. M. Lotmana s Jaanom Krossom ob istoricheskom romane,” Russkaia literatura 3 (2013): 218−232.